On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > OK - with the new machine up and running well enough to do some > work I really need to get some sort of virtualization going to see if > I can get around the fact that XP cannot be installed on this machine. > (at least not easily) I need to run TradeStation and I'd like to try > under Linux but Wine is ABSOLUTELY not an option. > > I ran XP & TS on my older system (5 year old 3GHz AMD64) but it's > been a long time since I tried it. The performance was just OK. I > expect this machine may be acceptable. > > To anyone familiar with this subject a few questions: > > 1) If I go the VMWare route is it vmware-workstation that I want?
If you want to pay money, it works and is very easy to use. vmware-server is free (but not open source?) > 2) Are there any prebuilt XP images that would save me the hassle of > installing Win XP and just allow me to validate with my existing keys? > Is this the purpose of vmware-player? (which doesn't seem to have > fetch restrictions...) vmware-player lets you run an existing virtual machine but not create one, IIRC. VMWare has a lot of "virtual appliances" on their website which are pre-made virtual machine images for various purposes. I don't think Windows is included. You'll probably have to install it manually. However, Microsoft gives away free time-limited XP virtual machine images (VirtualPC format; you'll have to convert it to the format of your choice, vmware has some free tool to do this for converting to their format), supposedly for testing for old Internet Explorer versions but you can install anything you want in them. I think they last for 6 months. You may be able to use some windows key-changer software (magical jellybean?) to reactivate that image with your own key. I don't know specifically which version of Windows they give or which version you're licensed to use. > 3) In some ways the most important question is what are the Open > Source alternatives and how easy are they to set up? http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/TechComparison It seems the most common choices I've seen mentioned are virtualbox, xen, kvm, vmware, in no particular order.
